The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Users in small and medium business (SMBs) environments need to track and organize data for a variety of business tasks, such as purchase orders, trial requests, daily transactional data, and etc. SMB users may use spreadsheet software, simple database applications, or word processing software to store data. However, the data is typically stored as files, and multiple users may not access or modify a file at the same time. Users may generate multiple copies of a file in order to share the file with others or track changes to the data, or store multiple files corresponding to different business tasks. It is difficult for users to consolidate data between versions of a file, determine which file is the most current, or otherwise share and organize files.
A large database system allows many users or client applications to connect to the database at the same time. However, large database systems may be costly or impractical for a SMB to implement. A large database system incurs setup and administration costs that may exceed the usefulness of such a system to a SMB. In addition, a database application may be specifically programmed based on particular use cases. A new application may need to be developed when new, unique transactions that do not correspond to existing use cases need to be stored.
Thus, it is desirable and beneficial to store and manage database data in a low cost, flexible system that allows sharing between multiple users.